Boomerang
by snowtamale
Summary: Loneliness is a part of life. To ever feel the security that comes from being in the arms of the one you love, you have to face the vulnerabilities that come with loneliness. But Holly is learning that she doesn't have to be lonely anymore. (Post Holly in San Francisco)


It's foggy nights like this that the loneliness really settles into her. It seeps into her bones and through her body like an insidious virus.

Holly is tired and cranky after a long day of dealing with a constant flow of cases that need about a hundred things done all immediately and all at once. And now, as she lays in an ungraceful heap on her couch, she realizes that she could really use someone, anyone, to comfort her.

She could call Gail just to hear her voice. Hell, if she was still in Toronto she would have already called Gail. But now they're just friends. Holly knows that she needs to give Gail the space to have her own life. She had already called Gail twice this week, she didn't need to keep bothering her.

In a fit of self-destructiveness, Holly finds herself on her balcony with a cigarette between her lips. A very stale cigarette left over from a half smoked pack her college days of smoking when she was very drunk or very stressed. Holly knows better. She's a doctor for heaven's sake. A dead people doctor sure, but a doctor nonetheless. She knows that cigarettes kill.

Holly should be good at being alone. She got along fine for the portion of her life before she met Gail and she could get along alone fine now that she'd met Gail. Gail hadn't changed anything right?

Holly had been through desertion before. Desertion by her parents who had left her in the care of her aging grandmother until her grandmother had gotten too old and too sick to take care of her. Then she was left to the system. She'd never really found a place there either. Not many people were looking to start families with ten year olds who didn't really talk much. Besides, her dyslexia had her reading at a first grade level and most prospective parents didn't want to take in a kid with so many 'problems'.

(Those memories always make Holly laugh bitterly. Because now with her multiple degrees (especially with her PhD) those same families that rejected her back then would definitely want a piece of her now.)

She had been left by her college girlfriend who told her that if the lab was so important she could just "date her laboratory for godsake". And the girls she 'dated' through grad school had been the kind that didn't stay the night.

If she's honest, she hasn't had one of those relationships where she actually wants to spend loads of time with the other person until Gail came along.

Gail.

In the time that they've known each other they'd spent more of it out of a relationship than in one. That always boggles Holly's mind. They've been 'friends' longer than they ever dated. Though Holly has to admit that she had entertained many non-platonic thoughts about Gail far before they ever started dating.

Her phone snaps her out of thoughts of Gail only to throw her right back into thoughts of Gail when she hears the voice on the other end.

"Heeeeey Hollss," Gail slurs excitedly over the phone.

Holly feels a little less lonely hearing Gail's voice, even if it's over the phone, "Gail?"

"Wasssup." Then Gail collapses into peals of laughter.

Holly raises her eyebrow even though she knows that Gail can't see her face, "Gail isn't it late over there? Shouldn't you be asleep?"

"It's super late but we were celebrating and I wanted to hear your voice. I miss you." Those last three words make Gail sound the most sober and serious she's ever sounded.

"Gail…" Holly breathes into the phone.

Gail is on a roll, "I miss your weird head tilty thing that you do when I say stuff and your crooked glasses and-"

Holly's hands come up to adjust her glasses, "My glasses are crooked?"

"I think- I think there's a thing I want to say but-"

"It's okay Gail. You should go celebrate okay? Have fun."

"Talk to you later Doc."

"Goodnight Gail."

Holly wants to throw her head back and just yell. She wants to take her frustration with the fates out on anything and everything. Maybe she should egg a car or a house or something. Except that she's not 16 and she was never that immature. So instead, Holly puts out her cigarette and heads inside to drink a bottle of wine.

* * *

><p>A month later and the loneliness is still there. It's Holly's weekend off and it's kind of bumming her out. This sense of despondency is just constantly filling her chest.<p>

The moments she spends alone with no one around make her feel the most alone she's ever felt. Holly has even made friends here in San Francisco. Friends who are funny and buy her drinks and set her up on dates to try and coax the loneliness from her heart. But the dates make her more lonely.

She can't help that the girl was a brunette not a blonde. Or that the girl's eyes were bright green instead of bright blue. It's also not her fault that there was a girl who was freakishly taller than her.

So maybe Holly has a very strict checklist when it comes to girls she wants to date. After a while her friends run out of girls they want to set her up with. They tell her that she's too picky and that she should just date someone, anyone.

Holly rolls over in bed and grabs her extra pillow to hug it tightly to her chest. It's a piss poor substitute for cuddling with a certain someone but it puts her at ease enough to fall asleep.

Holly is awoken by her phone's chirping. When she sees the name on the screen her heart starts beating faster and she quickly sits up in bed, fixes her hair and clears her throat before answering the phone.

"Hello?" Holly greeted, her voice still a little hoarse with sleep.

The voice on the other end makes Holly's heart plummet, "Hey. Holly? Don't freak out."

"Traci. What happened to her?"

Holly can hear Traci sigh deeply into the phone, "She's going to be okay."

"What happened Traci?"

Holly is trying to keep herself from panicking but as soon as she'd heard Traci's voice instead of Gail's voice on the phone her heart had plummeted. Now her breaths are coming in more shallow and more quickly and she realizes that she's starting to hyperventilate. Holly tries breathing deeply and just repeating the mantra "she's going to be okay" over and over in her head.

Traci's voice interrupts her relaxation techniques, "She took a bullet under her arm that punctured her lung and two more to her abdomen. She's still in surgery but-"

Holly puts her phone down; her body completely numb. She grabs her laptop immediately and starts booking her flight back to Toronto before throwing an eclectic mix of clothing into her suitcase and running out the door.

Holly had nabbed the last seat on the last flight to Toronto from SFO for the night. The flight itself had been a blur of nerves and restless energy. She couldn't seem to sit still or rest or calm herself down because the woman that she loved was in the hospital.

* * *

><p>When Holly gets to Toronto, Nick is already at baggage claim waiting for her with the squad car. He hugs her tightly and tells her that Gail made it out of surgery and is now resting in the ICU. She wasn't sure what kind of reception she'd get after leaving so suddenly for San Francisco but everyone seems relieved to see her and soon she's being hugged by the entirety of 15 division.<p>

It's really the tubes that make Holly stop in her tracks. It's more the fact that she knows what those tubes do and what those tubes mean. She saw patients in the ICU when she was a medical school student. She knows the percentages, the numbers, the statistics for survival with the myriad of injuries that Gail sustained. But there's nothing she can do. She can't help her girl because her girl is lying in a hospital bed hooked up to so many machines. All she can do is wait.

So she does.

Holly sits and waits. Eventually the nurses give up trying to kick her out and roll a cot into Gail's room for her. Holly can barely sleep. Every time she starts to drift off she keeps remembering that Gail is lying, pale as ever, in a hospital bed. So instead Holly just watches Gail and waits.

* * *

><p>It's coughing and gagging that wake Holly. When she looks over at Gail's bed she notices that Gail's eyes are open and that she's fighting the intubation tube.<p>

"I need a nurse in here. She's awake and she needs to be extubated." Holly yells from the doorway of Gail's room.

She knows logically that she could have technically extubated Gail herself, she does have a degree and plenty of certifications but her excitement is taking over her body and she doesn't trust her hands to be steady right now.

"You look worried Lunchbox," Gail's raspy voice croaks out.

Holly cautiously approaches the bed after the doctors and nurses leave, "Do you want water or ice chips or anything?"

Gail frowns at her, "Don't you have work?"

"It was my day off."

"Well this is just bruises and cuts Hols."

"Are you really going to be this cavalier about it?"

Holly narrows her eyes at Gail in disbelief. Gail is lying in a hospital bed after waking up from a three day coma and joking about the entire thing.

Gail tries her soothing voice, "Hol-"

"No. You don't get to 'Hol' me. You could have died on me. This is serious Gail. You had a perforated colon and a punctured lung. You...you….the woman I love could have died on me and I haven't even really talked to you or seen your face in weeks."

Suddenly Holly's fire, her anger, seems to die a little and her voice grows softer, more desperate, "I thought- When it was Traci's voice and not yours on the phone, I tried to remember your voice. I tried to remember the last thing you actually said to me. Not the last thing you texted but the last thing you said to me. And I couldn't. The whole plane ride over I was trying to remember the way your lips feel against mine and the way you hand feels in mine and the way your skin feels under my fingers but I couldn't. For months when I was alone in San Francisco I couldn't forget anything about you, and the minute something bad...no, something horrible happens to you and I couldn't remember and single thing. I never- god Gail. I never thought not being with someone could hurt this much. And you're just sitting here with three bullet holes acting like you scraped your knee on the playground or something. You could have died."

"I guess it was polite."

"What?"

"Your last spoken words to me were 'I guess it was polite' and my last spoken words to you were 'well she should have asked'. We were talking about your date who got you roses."

Holly closes her eyes in recognition and takes a deep breath, steadying herself and trying to let the little bit of anger (but mostly fear) go. Gail continues, "Didn't you tell her that you were allergic to flowers?"

Holly rolls her eyes, "That's not the point Gail. The point is that I was scared out of my mind that you wouldn't be alive when I got here. All your friends who are sitting in the waiting room have been scared out of their minds too."

Gail takes a couple of labored breaths before looking down so that she doesn't have to meet Holly's eyes.

"I know that it was scary. You don't think I know how scary it was? I know because when I was lying there on the sidewalk all I could think about was how I never told you that I loved you. Because we aren't together and you were 2000 miles away."

Holly grabs Gail's hands and squeezes them because she can't kiss Gail. She can't kiss Gail because she has an apartment and a job in San Francisco. She can't kiss Gail because Gail is still on meds and could just be saying things that she doesn't really mean. She can't kiss Gail like she wants to because she wants to keep her eyes open and watch Gail and make sure that Gail _stays_ alive.

Gail finally meets her eyes and smiles sadly. She reaches out and strokes Holly's hair a couple of times before letting her hand rest on Holly's cheek.

Their moment is broken when a nurse looks into Gail's room and clears her throat. The nurse takes down all of Gail's vitals and pokes and prods Gail as she checks the various wounds. Holly has to look away from the stitches that are literally keeping Gail together. She may be a doctor but she's emotionally compromised okay?

"So you look stable enough to be taken down to a regular room tomorrow morning. You can have all your visitors then," the nurse throws over her shoulder as she exits the room.

* * *

><p>After clearing it with Gail's doctor, Holly sneaks Gail a doughnut for breakfast. And as she sits on the end of Gail's hospital bed, she remembers everything. She remembers the biting words and the sparking eyes that drew her in. Just hearing Gail's voice and feeling the warmth of Gail's legs against her own make Holly feel like everything is going to okay.<p>

"So when do you have to go back to work?" Gail is trying so hard to casually throw the question out there but Holly can see the tension on her face and in the way she's gripping the last bite of doughnut as though it will save her.

Holly shrugs, "Tomorrow I guess."

"How is San Francisco?"

As Holly is about to answer Oliver barrels in with Andy and Traci close behind him. Holly smiles at Gail before taking her laptop to the waiting room to do some work while Gail catches up with her friends.

Holly can't seem to actually make her hands do anything productive though. The more she stares at her research, the work of her life, the less she wants to do it. She can't help but hate San Francisco a little bit, which is unfair since the city itself is great. It just happens to be 2000 miles further southwest than she would like.

Before she knows it Holly is typing up her resignation to the head of her research project. Holly knows what she has to do. She knows that she has to stay. She's put her career above everything else in her life because she's never really had anyone or anything else to prioritize. But now she has Gail. Or she will have Gail.

* * *

><p>AN: I needed Holly to come back. This will probably be wrapped up in another chapter.


End file.
